Blake's World

From Poets.org:

"Blake was a nonconformist who associated with some of the leading radical thinkers of his day, such as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. In defiance of 18th-century neoclassical conventions, he privileged imagination over reason in the creation of both his poetry and images, asserting that ideal forms should be constructed not from observations of nature but from inner visions. He declared in one poem, "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's." Works such as "The French Revolution" (1791), "America, a Prophecy" (1793), "Visions of the Daughters of Albion" (1793), and "Europe, a Prophecy" (1794) express his opposition to the English monarchy, and to 18th-century political and social tyranny in general. Theological tyranny is the subject of The Book of Urizen (1794). In the prose work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), he satirized oppressive authority in church and state, as well as the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish philosopher whose ideas once attracted his interest."

 

Blake's identity both as a consummate artist and a fringe-dweller is one of the first examples of  a "self-taught/visionary/outsider" artist becoming canonized in Western culture.  He wasn't appreciated during his lifetime, however, and decades after his death his work was re-discovered by artists and writers.  Eventually he would be seen as a forebear to Surrealism, 1960s counter-culture, and the ascendancy of "graphic novels" as a viable art-form.  People who revere him include:  Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsburg, Jim Morrison, Aldous Huxley, and Van Morrison, just to name a few. 

 

When pulling together exhibit ideas, we always try to find historical connections and echoes in order to better understand how artworks made by unconventional people are often not understood at the time of their making because of the cultural noise and drone.  Blake is a prime example of an artist not understood until well after he was gone.  In fact, his energy and spark seemed to come from a singular dedication to visions that contradicted the ideas and even morals of his times. 

 

"INNCE/EXPCE:  New William-Blake-Inspired Works by Emily Brandehoff and Robert McFate" uses Blake's beautifully complicated weirdness and craft as a jumping off point for two artists who are unconventional, operating outside of mainstream culture while also contributing to it.  Cincinnati-based Brandehoff paints visions of ghastliness with a sidecar of gut-level black humor.  McFate, from Pikeville, Tennessee, is a folk artist extraordinaire whose paintings, drawings and sculptures have an innocence backed up by backwoods wisdom.   We selected these two artists to take a look at Blake’s classic bipolar poetic epic, Songs of Innocence and Experience, a cycle of gorgeously illuminated poems that sees the world both as a ghastly garden and an Edenic one.   The results are contemporary paintings and drawings that use Blake’s wondrous imagination to go back to the future.  Also, as both an embellishment and a sort of allegory to correspond with the main show, we've pulled together works  by Opening Minds through Art, a program from Miami University that fosters art-making relationships among college students and elderly people, as well as works by kids from Suzanne Nall's art class at Parker Woods Montessori a few blocks down from Thunder-Sky, Inc.  These paintings and drawings symbolize "innocence and experience" in different, surprising ways, and also pay homage to one of Blake's most quoted statements:  "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is:  infinite."

 

For more infomation about Blake's life and art:  Poets.org.  

 

Number One Freak

 

 

Melissa McCarthy's performance in Identity Thief made me cry.  I wasn't really prepared for that kind of response.   Almost every review I read about the movie panned it, although almost everyone praised McCarthy's chops, as well as the chops of Jason Bateman, her co-star.  Identity Thief is truly a piece of crap, a retread of all kinds of comedy tropes (Planes, Trains and Automobiles, What about Bob, anything with Adam Sandler and/or Kevin James) that finds endless merriment in the overly obvious juxtaposing of freak and non-freak.  The premise is uptight family guy gets his identity robbed by a morbidly obese sociopath who wears tacky clothes.   These two opposing forces are forced together on a road-trip in order to prove something or other.  Truly the whole plot is preposterous (you keep wanting Bateman's character to just say fuck it and call his bank and do what anybody else does when this happens:  cancel his card and move on), and the machinations and motivations become so muddy you can't really tell what is what after a while. 

 

And yet there's McCarthy making me cry. 

 

I think it has something to do with how gungho she takes this character on.  The titular identity thief is a total concatenation of stereotypes, a fat, lonely, greedy, mentally-ill hoarder who likes to punch people in their throats when they get in her way and who has a sadsack back-story that may or may not be true.  McCarthy gives this cartoon a shadow-life with her eyes and her way of moving through space gracefully and authoritatively, as if she is dancing her way past the movie's cheap laughs in order to find a way to destroy your heart.  This happens most intensely in a couple scenes for me -- one in which Bateman catches her holding his daughter's hand, and in another when we first meet up with her at a bar where she's buying everyone drinks.  In both scenes, which bookend the movie, McCarthy conveys a sort of innocence that's based on an understanding that no matter how stupid the movie gets the main character she's playing is for real.  McCarthy makes this freak a transcendent freak, a full-fledged heart-broken criminal trying to steal her way out of herself.  In other words, McCarthy plays the character as a stand-in for all of us, so that Bateman's upstanding citizen seems like the cipher, when probably the movie itself was constructed to do the opposite. 

 

Kathy Bates did the same thing in a movie called Misery back in the day.  She invested all her abilities in making a fat, lonely, creepy, backwoods kidnapper/torturer into someone you could connect to on the most beautiful levels.  I remember when I first saw that movie I was devastated, not because in the end she was vanquished but because her vanquishing seemed morally wrong.  The plot of that flick is a Stephen-King potboiler about a romance writer imprisoned by his biggest and craziest fan, played by Bates.  James Caan plays the writer, and he is intended as the movie's central figure, representing good common sense.  So when Bates' freak takes a sledgehammer to his legs you're supposed to feel completely violated.  However Bates does the sledgehammer scene, and all her other scenes, with such verve and attentiveness and truth you feel connected to her need to smash knee-caps.  That's the common sense in this moral universe:  kneecap smashing.  Her transgressions became the norm, not because the movie wants it that way but because Bates does it that way.

 

The same thing happens in Identity Thief.  And it's a joyous experience.  Not because the movie is great, but because someone in it is greater than she should have been.   



 

Piano Strings

Ai Weiwei's "According to What" (currently at the Indianapolis Museum of Art) is pure perfection.  There's an Apple Store consumerist clarity to the whole thing, a clean, sleek fetishism that somehow becomes spiritual in its carefulness.  Weiwei is obviously a perfectionist, a craftsman, and a genius.  His story is told of course in the show because it has to be.  He's currently unable to leave China because of who he is and what he's done as an activist and political prisoner.  However, that biography of activism and  humanitarianism is not the biography Weiwei seems to want us to focus on.  In corresponding interviews and quotes throughout the show, he tries to reconfigure, even apologize for, his activism, for the sake of having people see and think about his art without the gloss and crutches of heroism.  It's the objects he makes that transcend biography and sanctity and even thought.  They are inscrutable, somehow cosmic, and just plain gorgeous.  The prime example is this flourish of rusty rebar pictured above.  The back-story is horrendous:  hundreds of Chinese school-children were killed in a 2008 earthquake.  The school buildings the children were in were made on the cheap, increasing the death toll.  The Chinese government has tried to cover up all of this, but Weiwei uses his visual intelligence as both testimony and transcendence.  The walls surrouding the rebar are covered in the school-children names.  The rebar used in the construction of the demolished buildings has been systemically hammered and stretched back into original longitudes, and Wewei arranges them in the gallery to mimic Seismographic readouts, oceans waves, governmental graphs, piano strings, rust-red lines of consciousness merging into amnesia... 

There's nothing you can say or do in response to what he's done here except  thank him for this proverb of both profundity and disruption.  When I walked around and stared at this installation I felt like I was leaving my body.  Art often can't get past itself, its own meanings and histories and languages, but here it has.  Weiwei has found a way to escape aesthetics through being an aesthete.  His focus provides relief from confrontation while his technique and style confront and confound.  He has created a place of pilgrimage.  And in the background there's a recorded voice saying each of the dead school-children's names.  Weiwei is not a preacher here.  He is an artist giving us an image and a moment that stretch out into eternity.  

Thou Art Sick

I asked Emily Brandehoff to jot down some words about her experiences working on the art she's making for "INNCE/EXPCE:  New William-Blake-Inspired Works by Emily Brandehoff and Robert McFate."  The show opens June 28, 2013, 6 to 10 pm reception at Thunder-Sky, Inc.  I'll be asking Mr. McFate to write down his feelings too. 

Love Emily's response:

 

I haven’t read a single poem since all of my writing, journals and books were taken from me when I was a teenager, I assume it was because they were “dark."  After seeing a psychiatrist for it (not my choice), I lost all interest in poetry.  I vaguely heard of William Blake, but never gave myself the chance to read any of his work.  That being said, it was a struggle for me to read Songs of Innocence and of Experience, but after finding liner notes posted online by college students, it all started to make sense.  Good, bad, evil, love, sex, controversy….I guess all of poetry is like that, but being “ahead of his time” is an understatement for Blake.   I related more to experience than to the innocent part, mainly from my own life.  It was a fun project to work on.  And although my mind doesn’t calculate how to tie someone else’s work into mine, I tried.  After some time though, I started to just have fun with it and realized experience is life.  So I chose the darker side because let's face it:  that's what makes someone who they are.

 

One of Blake's simple and unnerving "Experience" poems...

 

Incomprehensible

Molly Springfield is an artist I came across the last day of a show at Indianapolis Museum of Art on Sunday, titled "Graphite," a wonderful exhibit focusing on drawings made with, you guessed it, graphite.  What a lucky find.  Her work has a hermetically sealed innocence and intelligence to it that boggles your brain.  In a suite of drawings of copy-machine pages, Springfield pulls together obsession and yearning for knowledge in a sleek, creepy package.  The words are Proust's (from Swann's Way), the color and style from Xerox.  Each drawing I saw is a simple, rigorous articulation.   She turns words into objects with these pieces, replacing the beauty of Proust's prose with the method Proust used to express it.  It's like falling in love with some one's clothes, not the person, which isn't as superficial as it sounds.  The lusting after of intelligence, the need to consume and show what is being consumed, is what these drawings seem to represent, a sly comment on the luxury of reading without really reading.  The cleverness is not in the joke being given to us here, but in the supple realization, the graphite drawing representing a copy, and the copy being the original text on which the drawing is based.  A crazy conundrum pops up, and yet what's truly amazing is the quiet prayer emanating from Springfield's practice.  These are pages of a secret Bible you don't have to read to comprehend.  You just have to see.  It's like a formalized dyslexia, the sumptuous nothingness language can become once you realize you don't need to know what's being relayed to understand the power of its inception. 

Why William Blake?

We'll be celebrating William Blake in our next show at Thunder-Sky, Inc. opening  Friday June 28, 2013.  It's called “INNCE/EXPCE: New William-Blake-Inspired Works by Emily Brandehoff and Robert McFate,” and I came up with concept for many reasons, but mainly because I've always been in awe of Blake, both his visual and literary work, as well as his biography.  Back in 1988, when I was a sophomore at Indiana University/Purdue University in Indianapolis, I wrote a paper about Blake in an English class taught by Professor Phyllis Scherle.  She was one of those people that save your life, even though at the time you don't really recognize or understand that significance.  Soft spoken and very kind, she was my advisor.  I was a really shy, backwards kind of person, and she totally helped me understand that I could fit in at college.  I had dropped out of art school in 1984 to go to live with my mom and sister in Tennessee after my parents got divorced, and then I moved back to Indiana in 1985, did a lot of drugs and washed a lot of dishes until 1987, when I realized I had to do something or would just disappear into nothingness, maybe even die if I wasn't careful. Anyway Professor Scherle took me seriously.   Some schlep from nowhere, working full-time at Ponderosa Steakhouse and going to school full-time and feeling completely out of it.  She told me which classes to take and what books to buy, and then my sophomore year I took her English lit class, and she introduced me to William Blake.  She loved him, and this paper I wrote (see below) is sort of a love-letter both to Blake and to her.  Once she graded it, she took me aside and said she was sending it into a contest at Purdue University, and a few months later she told me it won First Prize.   There was a banquet and everything.  

This paper kind of made me realize I could win, thanks to Professor Scherle.  And reading Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience set me free.  They were poems that seem crazy-simple, beautifully and uniquely and disquietingly naive, but also wordly and complex at the same time.  Nursery rhymes that get stuck in your head, but also somehow lead you to the palace of wisdom.  Reading about Blake's life inspired me to no end as well.  He was a sort of literary/artworld curiosity when he was alive, taken seriously only to a point and often shut out of opportunities.  Or as Kathleen Raine writes in her bio of Blake:   "Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work."  Here was an artist and a writer who truly created his own path, and who by remaining stubborn and dedicated to his vision outlasted most of his contemporaries.  

Professor Scherle gave me a reason to stay in school, and to keep writing, and to know that I could fit in, even if I didn't.  

She gave me Blake.

And so when we thought about Thunder-Sky, Inc.'s exhibition season for 2013,  Blake came to my mind as a sort of precursor to the kind of art and artists we want to champion and celebrate.  Then I thought of two great artists who seem to fit the bill:  Robert McFate and Emily Brandehoff.  Both  have idiosyncrasy and creativity to spare.  I also wanted to add an ancillary gig featuring works by children and older folks, who also seem dedicated to finding out what art can do and can mean, outside of buying and selling...

I'm not sure Professor Scherle is still around.  But I'm dedicating this show to her, and to anyone who champions people who seem a little "idiosyncratic."   

Here's that paper I wrote, with Professor Scherle's comments... 

  

What Else Can I Say? Everyone Is Gay

Behind the Candelabra is a kitschy/kinky title for a movie that doesn't really tolerate kitschiness (it exonerates it), and while the Steven-Soderbergh-directed opus does dance lovingly around kink it is more a homage to the mundane pleasures nestled within an opulent cluster of feelings and possessions than a salacious bio-pic.  It's a Faberge-egg tribute, with a plot driven by a tried and true Lifetime movie arc:  rich old man takes on a young lover and then gets tired of that lover and moves on and then on his deathbed confesses his love.  Michael Douglas portrays Lee with an offhand sweetness and assurance that does not mock the great showman's mannerisms but somehow ennobles them, giving us a Liberace that lives and breathes and can say shit like "I just love to shop," without assigning him to a one-note stereotype.  It is very clear in this movie that Liberace assigned himself to whatever type he felt comfortable being, and this type comes off as a piss-elegant meditation on luxury and perseverance:  he was the hardest working queen in show business.  That "hardest-working" part seems to have fueled his appetites for a lot of things, including sex and palaces and hot-tubs and diamond rings.  Matt Damon plays Scott Thorson, Lee's conquest at the beginning of the flick, with a sort of understated angst and joy that seems to have been borrowed from Mark Wahlberg's performance in Boogie Nights; in fact his Thorson is a tribute to that movie's deadpan kindness and innocent depravity.  Damon ages from 18 to late 20s in the movie, and that process is so believable it's kind of magical, transporting you past the transgression inherent in Liberace's seduction of Thorson and more into the realm of how relationships work.  All the way through Candelabra you're hypnotized by a sort of longing to go back to those days when Liberace could seduce both old ladies in Las Vegas auditoriums and young men with long blonde hair and sweey glassy eyes, without anybody wanting to notice or care.  Sonderbergh has built a visual villanelle of a movie, overly mannered and lyrical, and also completely free of cynicism.  By the end, when Thorson envisions Lee's funeral as his final and gorgeous curtain call, you realize how much judgment people apply to pop-culture and how hard it truly is to actually see things as they really are.